• critical discourse analysis
• corpus-assisted analysis
• newspaper articles
• evaluative language
• racism

The aim of this study is to show the extent to which both UK and US mainstream newspapers (be they right-leaning or left-leaning) utilize distinctive patterns of evaluative meanings in order to advocate a political party on the sly or even to discredit minority groups (in this case, ethnic groups over the course of the last year). One of the questions I aimed to address was to prove the extent to which the US and the UK Press, especially in relation to left-leaning and right-leaning newspapers, perpetrate racism and xenophobia by maintaining white privilege/power.
Chapter 1 opens the study by providing insights into today’s British and American social and political scenes with a special focus on ‘racial’ issues. Chapter 2 is aimed at providing a robust background on the discourse of Press reports. Moreover, chapter 2 deals with investigations on the representation and construction of ‘race’, especially in the context of Press reports and news discourse. Chapter 3 investigates Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory and refers to critical discourse analysis. In addition, it outlines the methodology applied to create the corpus for the study and illustrates the way the analysis was carried out. Chapter 4 closes the analysis with the most significant results of the study in detail. To conclude with, some final remarks about the study and the findings will be discussed, as well as the potential prospects for future research in this area.